POEM BY JUDITH SKILLMAN
MONOLOGUE
I can live without company but not without
talking to myself. Blame it on the cat
who became a person. No one visits.
Procedures must be followed to a t.
Cooking for one equals tears an onion outlasts.
Perhaps these ministrations become habits.
Nothing new under the sun, all is vanity,
Permission to speak? Ecclesiastes.
I could have been more than I am but
things can’t be undone. The accident
happened. One wrong move and still at night
it could happen again. When your back quits
is a matter of time. Be blameless, soft-
toned, don’t froth so at the mouth of it.
Judith Skillman ’s new collection is House of Burnt Offerings from Pleasure Boat Studio. Her work has appeared in Tampa Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, New Poets of the American West, and other journals and anthologies. Skillman is the recipient of grants from the Academy of American Poets, Washington State Arts Commission, The Centrum Foundation, and other organizations. She has taught in the field of humanities for twenty-five years, and has collaboratively translated poems from Italian, Portuguese, and French.
Visit www.judithskillman.com
POEM BY WILL CORDEIRO
BRAIN IN A VAT
The goop of it throws
sparks; grey areas multiply.
Wink—a lapse of logic
leaps: tangled synapses
of thought will quicken
in turn this thing about’s
about. As if anyone
could, by sheer force
of reason, reason
one’s way free past doubt…
Hello. This is you. So find
another glassy truth. Give
your token face to its
reflection back. Believe, less
often, that whatever is
is more or less
unknown. See through
too much in this
life & you’ll risk going
blind. Wear a mask & it
may grow to fit—if
the world’s a theatre,
the mind is, too. A word
refers to a seizure
of words & intuition
feeds on loops to make
you think—think twice
whether, when the circuit’s
broken, any you remains:
like every trick, thin wisp
of smoke & oops!
it’s gone. You’ve failed
to know anything
other than illusion. It’s time
which places its demands
of us & yet what is it but a
spell, created by the mind?
Make time: you’ll drift
through dark & swift. Go
tell the maze you’re trapped
in that it’s all a lark: back-
facing rapture into an abyss.
Will Cordeiro ’s work appears in Cortland Review, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Fourteen Hills, Harpur Palate, Hawai’i Review, New Walk, Phoebe, and elsewhere. He is grateful for residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Risley AIR at Cornell University, and Petrified Forest National Park. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he is a faculty member in the Honors Program at Northern Arizona University.
POEM BY MICHAEL SPRING
ORIGINS
In a cave in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi 14 prehistoric paintings
including 12 human hand stencils, two naturalistic animal depictions –
one showing an animal called a babirusa or "pig-deer", and the other
showing a pig – date back to at least 40,000 years ago could be the oldest
known figurative work of art in the world.
the study published in Nature, 2014
pig and pig-deer
these are the images we found
in the Indonesian cave
not the wild, wild horses
and not the saber-toothed cave lions
and not Sasquatch
or bubble-headed astronauts
it’s the pig that accompanies
the prehistoric stains
of human hands
and what if we could crawl deeper
into the image?
perhaps we’d find
what the pig digested
or what is behind it
hidden from view
perhaps we’d discover
the I am nature source
that lit up the walls
inside Jackson Pollack’s head –
a drooling landscape –
an explosion –
the dribble and splatter
of a cosmic nature
Michael Spring is the author of three books and six chapbooks. His most recent chapbook won the 2013 Turtle Island Poetry Award. New work appears in Absinthe Poetry Review, Allegro, Blue Lyra Review, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, and Turtle Island Quarterly. He lives in Oregon, USA.